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by balthesar



Series: Kushiel's Drabbles [2]
Category: Kushiel's Legacy - Jacqueline Carey
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-29
Updated: 2008-04-29
Packaged: 2017-10-23 08:33:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/248302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/balthesar/pseuds/balthesar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can never go home again.  It's an appallingly trite sentiment, but one with an ounce of truth to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home

You can never go home again. It's an appallingly trite sentiment, but one with an ounce of truth to it: after you have travelled to somewhere so foreign it makes your head reel with the brilliant riot of colours and the babble of an awkward tongue, once your lips have burned with spiced meats and been soothed with cool tea, once you've finally learned how to tie that goddamned long sash into a turban--

Then you're called home, back to Terre d'Ange, ripped from the Akkadian casbah where you finally developed a taste for the spice and learned the tongue, back to court and sober doublets and subtlety. Poets sing their songs of the lands that all D'Angelines love, but there's no space for a D'Angeline that has learned to love other lands; for one that sometimes treads emerald-green fields and grey stone halls and longs for sun-baked dust and vivid white plaster. Saffron is too precious here to use as liberally as they do in Khebbel im-Akkad.

Some morning Barquiel L'Envers wakes early and forgets that he lies on a feather bed in the City of Elua; he expects to hear the calls of the faithful to prayer, to look out an ornate window and see the soaring minarets gleaming gold in the rising sun. He is greeted by a subdued pastoral landscape, the verdant fields and wide river Elua and his Companions claimed. It is not enough. He ties his turban around his close-cropped blond hair and ignores those others who claim it is pretentious affectation; they reveal their ignorance with every syllable.


End file.
